On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Ian Murray murrayie@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Thanks for the link. It makes interesting listening because there are claims that they tried to engage with the CentOS devs to offer support and resourcing, but that relationship was not forthcoming... so they intend to build (as I see it) a direct competitor distribution (i.e. "binary compatible"). Also interestingly, apparently they have recruited help from the SME/Contribs people, so I don't know if that means SME will die because it had precious little resources to start with (and now those resources work for the competition) or SME will still carry on and be rebased on Clear Core. Also stated in the audio is that this was all a direct response to the uncertainties around CentOS.
There is no such thing as a competitor in open source. Thinking like that has led to the closed "anti-competitor" and Microsoft style of "market-share" thinking that takes place on this list. Open source projects share information (well, most do).
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of it, the ONLY group of people who deserve ANY credit at all are the Redhat folks. So saying a product that is released off Redhat's coattails is competing with another product that is ALSO running off Redhat's coattails is absurd.
A more definitive list would be anyone who has created original packages. The Redhat folks, EPEL contributors, El'Repo/Rpmforge (Dag W), and ect. Those are the people who deserve credit, anybody can download a source rpm and use the Redhat ISO (which is available easily enough) to rebuild RHEL6. The major deterrent is probably that type of "competitive market share thinking" you're exhibiting.